One item that’s not in the slides, which were written in Feb 2008, but is in the screencast made later at OSCON (at 7:00) is the statement that “One quarter of all CPAN distributions have been updated in the last 4 months! Half of all in the last 17 months!” That’s an impressive and important statistic but it need updating. I think I got that from Schwern’s excellent “Perl is unDead” talk, but I don’t know how he got the figures or, more importantly, how to update them. (And schwern.org seems down so I can’t get the slides.)

At OSCON I also talked about myths relating to Perl 6 (again, not in the old slides, but starting at 19:20 in the screencast). I’d like to cover Perl 6 when I talk in Dublin in September, but the status of Parrot and Perl 6 has changed in the last 18 months even more than Perl 5. So I need help with good sources of hard data for Parrot and Perl 6, similar to what I have in the screencast but updated.

More generally, I’m also looking for new sources of information — hard data about the vigourous health of perl and its community. Have you seen any relevant talks/slides or blog posts you can recommend?

To give some context to last link… Perl was at 1% on Github at end of last year. It jumped to 3% (turn of year?) and then upto where it is now (6%). While these are adoption fuelled rates it probably still makes Perl the quickest growing language on GitHub in past 10 or so months (NB. historical figures are memory recalled so need verification!).

I’d be also glad if you could mention Padre the Perl IDE that grew from nothing to a good editor with some refactoring capabilities in year. If you are looking for numbers and graphs then the commit rate of the project and the growth in contributors might be interesting.

I don’t know if this is a popular myth, but in my opinion it got pretty much buzz recently. I mean “Perl sucks because of lack of X in its core” myth, with the main point being the OO, implemented with Moose.

I would rather say “Perl rocks because of lack of X in its core, and at least one implementation of X on CPAN”. If Moose started as a core extension, its development would be much, much slower. Not to mention the increased size of the core…

I think that having reasonably small and flexible core beefed with CPAN gives one the ability to “build one’s own Perl”, extending the language only with bits relevant to the specific task. And on the other hand, it gives the maintainers of those bits more flexibility, thus making the development faster.

You may find it useful to mine the data from stackoverflow.com. For instance, here is a person who has started exploring the differences in weekday vs weekend usage of different languages. He left out perl, though. You may find other useful questions to explore in that data.

Hi Tim.
Having recently done my The Statistics of CPAN talk, I ran ALOT of numbers passed everyone, both in Pittsburgh (YAPC::NA) and Lisbon (YAPC::Europe) and got a lot of interest. Pittsburgh got a 20min talk, while Lisbon got a 5 minute lightning talk and both talks are now available online:

The trends graphs look at the overall uploads to CPAN and the new uploads to CPAN. The latter is very interesting in that it highlights that we are seeing over 200 brand new distributions (as in .. never appeared on CPAN before) being uploaded to CPAN every month and around 40 brand new authors uploading their first CPAN distribution each month. The first graph just show how many distributions are being uploaded each month and how many authors are uploading. As I say in my talk, there are no signs in the last 10 years that CPAN has ever felt anything but growth!
Feel free to use graphs, numbers, etc at will. If you need any other data, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.
Now I’m gutted I can’t make Dublin ;)

One indicator of Perl’s growth might be the number of accounts at perlmonks.org (and other such sites). I get the impression that there are new users joining and some becoming active (rather than lurking), based on searching the user list for the last day or week. There might be seasonal variations, eg, a Summer slowdown, followed by a rise in the Fall season. There was a recent security breach, which might affect the number of users also.